September 12, 2022 Russia-Ukraine news

Follow the latest news on Russia's war in Ukraine here and read more about today's developments in the posts below.

The White House cannot say for certain that recent Ukrainian advances represent a major turning point in the war, but a top adviser called the reports "impressive."

National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told CNN on Monday he didn’t know if “we can say that definitively today” the rapid advance was a major turning point.

Earlier on Monday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces have recaptured 6,000 square kilometers (around 2,300 square miles) in the east and south of the country since the start of September.

While Kirby wouldn’t estimate just how much territory the Ukrainians have retaken, he said the operations “had an effect on the Russians, have forced them to push back, certainly have forced them to give up territory and to move away in retreat from where the Ukrainians have been advancing.”

He noted, in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, that even since the early days of the war, Russian soldiers “did not have the unit cohesion, they didn't have the good leadership, they didn't have the morale, they were running away from the fight, even in the first couple of weeks in and around Kyiv.”

Asked how significant the blowback could be on Vladimir Putin, Kirby said the Russian president is "having more and more difficulty hiding the size and scale and scope of his failures inside Ukraine from the Russian people."

Ukrainian forces continue their counteroffensive and President Volodymyr Zelensky says they have re-captured 6,000 square kilometers (around 2,300 square miles) since the beginning of the month.

Meantime, the situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant remains tense. The head of the UN atomic energy watchdog says he is still "gravely concerned" as long as there is shelling around the plant. He said both countries are interested in establishing some kind of protection zone around the plant, which is currently being held by Russian troops.

Here's what else to know today:

Ukrainians have presented Russian forces with "multiple dilemmas along the forward line of troops," a senior US military official said Monday, including where to apply their limited resources after Ukrainians moved swiftly over the weekend to re-capture territory.

The change in battlefield dynamics is "indicative of the reports" of Russian forces having "low morale, logistics issues, inability to sustain operations," the US military official said. Ukraine’s military advanced on two fronts: a slower, more deliberate push in Kherson in southern Ukraine and a rapid advance through depleted Russian forces near Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s advances have forced Russia to decide where it wants to move its forces and how to use them, the official said, a decision which is always challenging in the middle of a war. “It’s a very hard problem to solve,” the official said, and it’s made even more difficult by the sustainment, logistics, and command and control issues that the Russians have experienced since the start of the invasion.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces have recaptured 6,000 square kilometers of land in the east and south of the country since the beginning of the month as he appealed for greater international pressure to isolate Russia.

According to analysts, that would amount to nearly 10% of the territory lost to the Russian offensive since it began in February.

In his daily video message, Zelensky also asked: "Why can [Russia] wage war so cruelly and cynically? There is only one reason — insufficient pressure on Russia. The response to the terror of this state is insufficient."

One answer, he said, was to "increase aid to Ukraine, and above all speed up the provision of air defense systems."

Some European countries have enacted bans on tourist visas for Russians; most have not.

Zelensky said Russia was to blame for "energy terror. Residents of many countries around the world are suffering due to the painful increase in prices for energy resources — for electricity, for heat. Russia does it deliberately. It deliberately destabilizes the gas market in Europe."

He added:

The president described the attacks on Ukrainian electricity supplies as "a sign of the desperation of those who invented this war. This is how they react to the defeat of Russian forces in the Kharkiv region."

Russian forces have “largely ceded their gains to the Ukrainians” in the vicinity of Kharkiv in the northeast, according to a senior US military official, with “many” of the Russian forces moving back over the border. 

The official also said the US believes Ukrainian forces “have very likely taken control of Kupiansk and Izium in addition to smaller villages.”

The official also said that reports of abandoned Russian equipment in the wake of their retreat “could be indicative of Russia’s disorganized command and control.”

In the Kherson region in the south, the official said the US sees “deliberate and calibrated operations by the Ukrainians to include some moderate forward movement.”

The official also said the US continues to see shelling around the Zaporizhzhia plant, which had its last reactor shut down, according to the country’s nuclear agency Energoatom.

The president of Ukraine's state nuclear company — Energoatom — told CNN that the power units at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant remain in a cooling state while work continues to restore power lines from the plant.

Speaking to CNN via Skype, Petro Kotin, said all seven lines connecting to the plant were damaged, and it had switched to what he called the "island mode" — where the plant supplied electricity solely for itself.

"We tried to prolong the operation of one of our power units for as long as possible, even in the conditions when it was operating in island mode. It worked for us for three days," he told CNN.

Kotin said just one of the six power units remained working, and was supplying the needs of the plant — the electricity necessary for the pumps that cool the nuclear material. The reactors "are full of nuclear material, fuel and also there are six pools that are located near the reactors at each power unit. They need to be constantly cooled," he said.

"The hazard is that if there is no power supply, the pumps will stop and there will be no cooling, and in about one and a half to two hours you will have a meltdown of this fuel that is in the reactor," he added.

Kotin reiterated that when there is no external power supply, the diesel generators could kick in. "As of today the diesel generators can work there for ten days."

Kotin said representatives of the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), remained at the plant. "They have meetings with the plant management twice a day, so they have all the current information on the plant’s operation," he said.

As for the IAEA proposal for a safety zone around the plant, Kotin said: "We don’t fully understand what this safety zone means exactly."

He repeated the Ukrainian government's line that the plant should be returned to Ukrainian control and the power plant itself and zone around it should be demilitarized.

CNN was given exclusive access to the town of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region, just a day after pictures emerged showing soldiers hoisting the Ukrainian flag on the roof of the town’s municipal building.

Far from being a town under full Ukrainian control, CNN found one still being bitterly fought for.

At the edge of the town, Vasyl – who declined to give his last name for security reasons – tells us that for days “they (the Russians) were shelling and shelling” in the ongoing fight in Kharkiv.

On Sunday afternoon, the dull thud of outcoming artillery fire was punctuated by the more infrequent boom of incoming fire. Russian forces were still fighting for Kupiansk, a town that is crucial to their supply lines, connecting their military base across the northern border in Russia’s Belgorod to Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region and the frontlines of the Donbas.

Ukraine’s top military commander General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi claimed Sunday that the country’s military had retaken more than 3,000 square kilometers (around 1,158 square miles) of territory since the beginning of the month, much of that believed to be in the Kharkiv region.

But on the ground, the fate of Kupiansk appears far from certain, indicating that maintaining Ukrainian control over newly liberated territory in the area could prove difficult.

Further west, some villages have seen calm entirely restored such as in the Kharkiv region’s Zaliznychne, liberated last week, as the eastern counteroffensive picked up speed. There, the fight appears to have been far less painful.

Read more about what CNN saw in eastern Ukraine over the last few days here.

The Ukrainian Prosecutor's office in Kharkiv says it has begun an investigation into reports that civilians were murdered by Russian occupying forces in a village in Kharkiv region.

In a statement on Facebook, the prosecutor said local residents in Zaliznychne had reported that Russian forces had killed several of their fellow villagers.

"On September 11, law enforcement officers discovered four corpses. All of them have traces of torture," the Prosecutor's Office said.

"According to the preliminary version of the investigation, the victims were killed by the Russian military," the Prosecutor's Office said.